SUNDAY WATCH.

Tv-wary Elie Wiesel Has Little Use For Washington, Walesa

November 26, 1995|By James Warren.

WASHINGTON — His life has been spent confronting humanity's darker hours. His manner is so dour, one imagines a monk closeted in a dank and candle-lit corner, putting pen to parchment, groping to explain the unspeakable.

So I just had to ask, Elie Wiesel, witness to and chronicler of the Holocaust, this Ultimate Question: Does he even have a television in his New York City apartment?

"Ah, yes," the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner confirmed with a smile last week. "I now have one TV. I mostly watch CNN if there are breaking news events.

"I actually like the simultaneity of an event and the reporting of that event. When a man walked on the moon, I was much less enchanted with the idea of a man walking on the moon than by the fact that, while he talked, I could hear him on this stupid little planet Earth."

Wiesel, 67, is a formidable presence, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald whose parents and one sister died in the death camps. He wound up in a French orphanage after the war and, as journalist and novelist, developed both the deepest faith and deepest despair about the human condition as he toils to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust.

Being in Washington, even fleetingly, does not appear to renew his faith. "I come here as rarely as possible," said Wiesel, who had to make treks to the capital in the 1970s and 1980s after of being appointed to Holocaust-related presidential commissions.

"Everybody here likes and wants power. The motor, the engine, of Washington is power. That is not what drives my life.

"The congressman wants to be a senator. The senator wants to be a vice president. The vice president wants to be president. I have met many of them and, in my official functions, was favorably impressed by them. But outside of my functions, when you heard people talk, it was about who was up and who was down."

Wiesel is promoting a book of memoirs, "Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea" (Knopf), which takes his life up to 1968. It's a passionate, generally somber, account of his life that draws on his previous works, notably "Night."

But it doesn't touch upon subjects such as TV talk shows, Lech Walesa, whether the Holocaust would have happened in a world with CNN and, finally, Newt Gingrich being dissed by President Clinton on the Air Force One trek to Israel.

He tends to limit his TV appearances, opting for what strike him as the saner ones, such as "Nightline" and what was long known as the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" . Indeed, he was so out of it, he didn't have a clue who Oprah Winfrey was when first approached to be on her show.

"I did not know who she was and would not go (to Chicago)," he said. "When I heard about her, I still wouldn't go. I heard she had all this confrontation. I don't like confrontation. But then she came to my home, and we spoke only about `Night,' which she knew by heart. I came away admiring her and her professionalism."

It's far different with Lech Walesa, who lost in last week's Polish election. Wiesel's inherent compassion is not on display. A prime Walesa supporter initially, who even chartered a plane once to Krakow for a Nobel-related conference just so the then-underground Solidarity leader could attend, Wiesel said, "I'm glad he lost."

It's because of what Wiesel began to detect as anti-Semitism in Walesa, including his use of the term "true Poles," among others. As the years wore on and he got to know Walesa better, Wiesel's negative impressions only hardened.

Words are more important to him than images. He misses a world of small book shops, of people actually discussing literature for literature's sake, and does not think we're so much better off for our immersion in television.

"What is being lost is the magic of the word," he said. "I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the cave man. Cave man couldn't express himself, so he put images on walls."

It was not a terribly novel question, but I was prompted to ask if TV coverage of Adolf Hitler's rise might have altered history. If CNN was around to cover him in the same way it covers President Clinton or famine in Ethiopia, might . . .

"Look," Wiesel said, catching my drift, "the world knew what was going on. For example, read the Chicago Tribune of May 1944 and you'll find stories about Hungarian Jews being deported. It's just that the information wasn't transformed into knowledge.

"And if you see Hitler on film, he looks ridiculous: shouting, gesturing. But the religious fervor with which people listened to him! . . . What was so magical about a man who now looks like a clown to us?"

And, finally, speaking of looking foolish: What about Gingrich's griping over the trip to Yitzak Rabin's funeral?

Wiesel was on the flight, way up front, sitting with the secretaries of treasury and defense, the ambassador to the UN and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "If I would have known about Gingrich's displeasure," he said, with mocking magnanimity,"I would have given him my seat."